Linux on the PS3

After a lot of back and forth I finally got Linux installed on my PS3. Ended up installing Yellowdog Linux. Not sure how much I will be using it though due to the lack of OpenGL support and access to the video card. Would have been nice to run Elisa on it though, but I guess once we get around to doing a DirectFB backend for pigment.

Linux on the PS3 feels a little ‘raw’ due to the graphics issue, and while the Sony people I talked to about it put the blame on NVidia for refusing them to make the GPU available in the hypervisor I think the value for Sony in having people being able to learn how to program for the PS3 under Linux should be big enough to do the needed legwork to get the GPU available with OpenGL support. I could see people even using this box as their primary desktop machine in such a case.

Suprised me also to see that YDL ships GStreamer 0.10.4 on the box, which is rather old at this point. A brand new distro like YDL 5.0 should have been able to update this. My next target is to try and compile the Fluendo plugins on the box to see how they perform. The combination of 64-bit and BigEndian might of course reveal some more bugs even.

DVB and Elisa

Got myself two WinTV NOVA-T-500 cards today. I gave one of them to Philippe so he could come through on his promise to get DVB support into Elisa if I got him such a card. The card is a nice dual tuner one, so its perfect for also making sure we can support watching one program and recording another.

On the topic of donating hardware to people. I have already promised to pitch in on the Delta 44 card that Jono is buying for Tim which I think should also help us resolve the issues that Davyd Madeley reported in his latest blog entry regarding his Alesis io|2 card with GStreamer and Jokosher.